You make a really good point, it would be very awesome to see improvements in our build tool chain that help with automation and allow you to repeatably and reliably store the build tools alongside your sources without requiring installers. Next time I bump into someone from DevDiv, I'll bring it up and see what they think. I'm guessing there's a better solution I haven't heard of

I didn't think it seemed awkward that representatives were there from both Nvidia and ATi - as Eric Young from NVIDIA pointed out, each H/W provider has strenghts and weaknesses but both are very powerful for GPGPU applications. As far as guidance that
we have on OpenCL vs DirectCompute, I will see if I can get any insights for you and it would be interesting to hear what the panelists would say so we'll try and get them to come into the forum. I would imagine that they would chime in that the quality checks
(hardware logo and certification, for example), Microsoft tooling and documentation, and support assurance from Microsoft for DirectX and DirectCompute are pretty nice to have for DirectCompute developers. Granted, the series probably doesn't address this
because it may just be a matter of preference or religion such as the debate between whether someone should use Vim, Emacs, or Notepad.

Short update here including some discussion internally DirectCompute enables:

Compatibility guarantees - any DX11 card has guaranteed feature support for DirectCompute and CS5.0

Designed with graphics in mind – often you want to display what you calculate, and D3D+DCompute provides a more tightly knit API to do this than any other, including OpenCL+OpenGL.

Bummer, I will see what I can do to look into this. Also, we'll be looking into creating other higher fidelity versions that run in a special interface - there are publishing challenges to that so it might take a little while longer.